Year the World Was Mine - by Rochelle Almeida (Paperback)

About the Book

This inspirational memoir will keep you chuckling, cheering, and biting your fingernails as you armchair-travel with a book-devouring, museum-hogging, food-savoring, fun-loving globe-trotter whose huge doses of optimism and humor helped her cope with several crises as she spen...

Book Synopsis

This inspirational memoir will keep you chuckling, cheering, and biting your fingernails as you armchair-travel with a book-devouring, museum-hogging, food-savoring, fun-loving globe-trotter whose huge doses of optimism and humor helped her cope with several crises as she spent one academic year conducting field research in London.

Review Quotes

For most people, turning fifty, is the beginning of the end. But for Rochelle Almeida, it was the launching of an entirely new life, a life of adventure, a life of excitement. For us, couch-potatoes, more likely to be found flicking the remote mindlessly, The Year The World Was Mine is a welcome antidote to boredom and drudgery. We experience a vicarious romp through the real world as seen through the eyes of a woman unafraid to grasp all that life throws at her outside her comfort zone.

For Indians born even two decades after Independence, dreams are still filled with days spent picnicking on scones slathered with the clotted cream of which Enid Blyton had written and cool evenings sauntering down Penny Lane of which the Beatles had sung. Post-colonial anxieties and latent Anglophilia co-exist effortlessly. In The Year The World Was Mine, Rochelle Almeida takes a year-long journey to the Little Island for which many Indians have secretly yearned. Her writing is so vivid, you can tag along without leaving your armchair.

If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium...or Belfast...or Berlin. With one pocketful of dreams and two sturdy feet (that let her down badly), Rochelle Almeida celebrated the onset of her fiftieth year in the world's favorite cities. This is a fun-filled if unsettling account of what can happen when a daring woman grabs the opportunity to fly solo during a year's stay in London. In a fast-paced narrative about travel adventure, an Indian professor from New York details the unexpected encounters she had with odd-balls of every sort as she lived in European youth hostels. Coming face-to-face with a global financial crisis, international terrorism, and a painful foot ailment, she weathered every storm while befriended by a helpful host of human angels. Entertaining and amusing, this brilliant example of story-telling will keep you enthralled as you globe-trot with a back-packing half-centenarian.

Joyce once remarked that if Dublin should be destroyed, it could be rebuilt brick for brick by a careful reading of his Ulysses. Rochelle Almeida's remarkable memoir, The Year the World was Mine: An Anglophile Hits A Half-Century, enables the same, kind, detailed restoration for much of Europe and even a small piece of India. Where has this restless pilgrim not been? What has she not seen? Because I'll tell you what she has seen: the insides of youth hostels from Barcelona to Belfast, the home of the Brontes, the oracle at Delphi, the snows of Oslo, the homeopaths of Bombay. All this, and it's not even New Year's! The prose is chirpy--all encounters met with a kind of droll delight, even when they include icy snows, shared soap, and appointments with the European health care system for various afflictions and hard knocks. A map of Professor Almeida's travels would be dizzying, but besides home, there is one destination the memoir heads toward with a sense of inevitability: a lectern at Exeter College, Oxford, where she'd been a student thirty years earlier. Lecture delivered: check. Dream fulfilled: check. So, travel concluded? Are you kidding? Not as long as there are roads un-rode and tapestries unseen, and for that we should be as thankful as our inexhaustible narrator.

Rochelle Almeida's travelogue whirls you through different countries and time zones but it is tinged by the mordant wit of a woman traveller watching the world with an amused and affectionate curiosity. Take this along on your next vacation; or read it on a staycation.

Rochelle Almeida's The Year The World Was Mine: An Anglophile Hits A Half-Century, brings together the charming but often endearingly tragic accounts of a traveling academic, as she contemplates the nature of her milestone, the reality offered by her encounters and the memorable travails of her circumstances. Witty to the bone, deadpan and largely irreverent, her memoirs make a terrific read.

About the Author

Rochelle Almeida is professor of global cultures in liberal studies at New York University.